The Ultimate Guide to FPS Performance Improvements In Lethal Company

Are you playing lethal company on a potato? Or maybe you want to enjoy Lethal Company VR (Virtual Reality) and need all the frames you can get? This is the guide for you filled with various tips for gaining as much performance out of lethal company as you can get. Most of these will involve modding the game through a thunderstore compatible mod manager!

Introduction

After having modded the game like crazy I recently noticed there's not really a big collection of information on various different methods of improving performance in lethal company in one place, so here it is!

This guide will help you on getting the absolute most performance out of lethal company as possible. Now, a lot of these will involve a plethora of mods, but don't worry! these wont be hard to set up if you are using a mod manager such as Thunderstore, r2modman, or (my preferred modmanager) Gale.

There are some other tips that will not require mods, however I wouldn't expect HUGE gains from these since Lethal Company itself has some problems that are only fixable with mods until Zeekers implements these fixes.

Modless Performance Increases

There is not really a lot you can do without mods, however I would recommend the following if you really badly need to improve your performance in lethal company.

Launch Commands

There are a few launch commands you can use to potentially improve performance in lethal company. If you don't know how to add launch commands to a game on steam, simply:

Right Click Lethal Company in Steam > Properties

A window should open that looks like this:
In that text box, add the launch commands you wish to use.

List of Launch Commands

Thanks to a Guide by Hunger and a Guide by Just Call Me York for some particularly useful launch commands. They are as follows:

• -nolog
  Disables logging.
  
  
• -no-stereo-rendering
  Disables stereo rendering.
  NOTE: If playing in VR I would suggest not turning off stereo rendering
  
  
• -screen-quality Fastest
  Tells unity "♥♥♥♥ it we ball" and throws the games shaders, and overall quality away to make things go fast™
  
  
• -force-d3d11-no-singlethreadedTries to force the game to use DirectX11, also tries to force the game not to do single threaded rendering.
  
  
• -screen-width desired width here -screen-height desired height here
  Changes the resolution of the game. for example, setting width to 1280 and height to 720 would change the games resolution to 720p.

How to use launch commands on mod launchers

Launching the game through a mod launcher will not apply launch commands that are set within steam itself (Thanks to Sapphire for pointing this out). To add launch commands in either Thunderstore or r2modman, click settings, and then find the option "Set Launch Parameters". You should see a screen appear something like this:

As for Gale, at the current time of writing, there is no launch parameter option, will change this when it is added.

Task Manager

For those that don't know, there is a handy little tool inside windows called task manager. You can open it by holding the following keys down:

CTRL SHIFT ESC

A window should open that looks like this:

Click more details, the window will show a lot more information now, don't worry about it. Go to the details tab, find "Lethal Company.exe" right click it, set priority to High. Warning: Do not set the priority to realtime

Discord

Unless you are somehow still on skype or teamspeak, chances are you probably use discord as your platform of choice for talking with friends on. There are 2 things about discord that could actually be making your FPS in Lethal Company worse.
Discord Overlay
Go to settings, and turn off the discord overlay like in the screenshot here:


Hardware Acceleration
Another thing that could also be absolutely tanking your framerate is something called "Hardware Acceleration". This basically makes discord use your GPU to run smoother, but obviously you want games to be using your graphics card more! you can turn this off by going to settings > Voice & Video > Scroll down to Hardware Acceleration.

Do note that turning this off will make your discord look a lot less smooth when interacting with discord itself.

Spotify

If you want to listen to music while playing, there is hardware acceleration in spotify that is enabled by default. To turn this off, click the 3 dots in the top left of the window, edit > Preferences > Compatibility > Enable Hardware Acceleration turn this off.

Steam

You likely wont gain much FPS out of this, however you can try to turn off the steam ingame UI specifically for lethal company. This will stop the ingame invite option that appears in the escape menu from working so you will have to tab out of lethal and into steam to invite people.

Right click lethal company in steam > Properties > Enable the steam Overlay while ingame (flicked off)

Game DVR in Windows

There may be a chance DVR is turned on in windows, this allows you to record the last however long has passed, though what this actually means is you are always recording. This is a performance loss. To turn this off, go to settings > gaming > Capture and then look for "Record in the background while im playing a game" and turn that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ off uwu

Windows Game Bar

This is yet another overlay. Overlays take up some performance themselves. To turn this off go to Settings > gaming > Game Bar and turn the very first slider off.

Important: If you play other games that use the Xbox gamebar such as Sea of Thieves, Halo: The Masterchief Collection or Halo Infinite, you will need to turn the gamebar back on later for inviting/joining non-steam players in those respective games.

OBS

Generally recording a game is going to tank your FPS. However something not many people bring up when using OBS is that their preview window is turned on. Turning this off will give you better performance while recording/streaming lethal company. This will be good for both lethal companies performance and your Encoder when recording/streaming. Again though if its performance you want, close the recording software.
To turn this off, right click juuuust outside of the preview like so in the screenshot, and uncheck "Enable Preview".

The MEAT of FPS Gains (Modding)

This will be where a majority of your FPS improvements will come from. Now, this part will be broken down into two sections, as some mods are serverside which will require everyone playing to have these mods, not just you. Mods that only you will require will be listed as clientside. But first, if you are unfamiliar with lethal company modding, you might find yourself asking:

How mod?

Most lethal company mods are available from Thunderstore. You can install mods manually (though this is more prone to user error, and a lot more time consuming), or by using a mod manager!
There are 3 good mod managers that you can use for thunderstore for lethal company.

Thunderstore Mod Manager[www.overwolf.com] (this will also install Overwolf to your PC, don't use this one if you dont want that piece of bloatware)
r2modman[thunderstore.io] If you've modded Risk of Rain 2 you likely have this already.
Gale Mod Manager[thunderstore.io]

I'd suggest Gale myself as it is more responsive than thunderstores own mod manager, doesn't have ads baked into it, and doesn't install any extra bloat.

Select your game, make a profile, and you'll be good to go to start adding mods as you please :)

Clientside Mods

This section will cover mods that only the user needs to install, so lets get right into it.

Something to keep in mind for any mods that require config editing is that the config files are not automatically generated before launching the game, so launch after installing mods, then close the game before trying to edit config files and telling me in the comments "I cant find the config files!"

HDLethalCompany

HDLethalCompany[thunderstore.io] is a mod that allows you to customise the graphics settings for lethal company by quite a bit. While as the name implies you can use this to make your game look better, you can also use it to make the game look a lot worse, which is important for FPS gain.

The mod wont do much by itself without you configuring it, so once you've installed it and generated the configs, go into the mod manager of your choice, and find the config named "HDLethalCompany".
If you are using Gale, mousing over the texts will tell you the available values.

If you don't care about your game looking super ugly, feel free to turn everything off, and everything to their lowest values, and set your resolution value to 1.0 or lower.
Just keep in mind with the fog option that some people may consider turning fog off cheating since you normally can't see very far in foggy conditions.

LethalFixes

LethalFixes[thunderstore.io] fixes so many bugs that i'd be here all day talking about what it does. Kudos to Dev1A3. Check the mods page for a list of all fixes. Fixes a range of things from both client and host. Not required by host however further benefits are available if the host also has this mod.

Some fixes can be customisable in the mods configs such as the logging levels for Dissonance and the logging levels for NetworkManager.

Async Loggers

Async Loggers[thunderstore.io] moves logging to a seperate thread from the game! This helps a lot for performance gains, though especially so in modpacks as they get bigger and bigger.

CleanerLogs

CleanerLogs[thunderstore.io] allows you to change the logging level for things that are a part of the vanilla game. The less often things get spat into the log the more performance you'll gain.

CullFactory

CullFactory[thunderstore.io] is a mod that stops the game from rendering interiors that you cannot currently see (why does the game even do this????). This is one of the best ways to gain framerates especially on larger interiors or in modpacks.

Help! EVERYTHING is black!
This happens when a rendering related mod has been updated, or sometimes when CullFactory itself is updated. Wait for either/both mods to update, and turn off cullfactory in the meantime. This happens from time to time between CullFactory and Lethal Company VR[thunderstore.io].

Terbium

Terbium[thunderstore.io] reduces load times from config files saving too often. If you experience crashes or issues on custom moons/interiors turn this mod off.

Faster Load AssetBundles Patcher

Faster Load[thunderstore.io] makes booting modpacks up quicker by decompressing assetbundles first before loading them. This ones only really important for larger modpacks or modpacks with a lot of assetbundles.

Loadstone

ah, Loadstone[thunderstore.io]. Notice that freeze whenever you are about to land on the planet and everyones mics are dead while you are all frozen in place? Yeah this mod fixes that. If you experience any difficulties with this mod then turn off Asynchronous Generation. Turning the setting off will bring the freeze back but other performance gains are still available from the rest of this mod.

Serverside mods

This section is for mods that are required by all players.

FixCentipedeLag

FixCentipedeLag[thunderstore.io] fixes a problem where bugs spawn in places they cannot path out of.

PathfindingLagFix

PathFindingLagFix[thunderstore.io] patches how several different enemies check for available paths. This is a huge performance gain since this can happen potentially every 0.2 seconds when not patched! If you use this mod you do not have to use FixCentipedeLag as this mod also patches snare flea behaviour instead of just killing it.

LethalFixes

Lethal Fixes[thunderstore.io] is not necessarily a hard serverside requirement however it does have some fixes that are applied from the host that everyone can benefit from. Fixes a massive range of things, see mod page for details.

Honourable mention

LobbyCompatibility

While Lobby Compatibility[thunderstore.io] wont directly give you any performance gains, it will allow you to check what mods public servers have on them (if they have this mod themselves), which can give you a bit of a heads up on servers to avoid if there are mods on those servers that you yourself know have framerate issues.

VR Specific Improvements

This section is for players playing lethal company using the VR mod LethalCompanyVR[thunderstore.io].


Fiddling with the VR mods own settings may help, especially any settings related to upscaling such as DLSS, however the scaling options currently in the LCVR mod look.... quite ugly. I plan on checking if VRPerfKit works with lethal company later, so check this section every so often.

There isn't a whole lot you can do here outside of maybe fiddling with your headset of choices settings, or maybe messing around with something like OVR Advanced Settings. However if you are using an Oculus headset theres a big performance gain for PCVR in general coming up.

NOTE: OVR Advanced Settings is no longer free.


OpenXR Toolkit also apparently works with lethal company, however I have not yet tested this myself, coming back to this at a later date.

Help everything is black!
Do you have CullFactory installed? if you have and are getting this problem, turn it off and wait for either the VR mod or cullfactory to be updated before turning cullfactory back on.

SteamVR

Turn off Advanced Supersample Filtering in steam vr, and also adjust your render resolution per eye, down to 100% should be fine, though you can lower it further if you dont mind the lower resolution.
to do this, make sure your headset is connected and turned on, go to steam vr's settings, and go into the video tab shown here and adjust Render resolution, render quality and supersampling as you see fit.

Also, turn off SteamVR home if you have that open.

Oculus Quest users

The oculus kind of gets bogged down by meta for its performance, fortunately theres a way to claw back the frames that are being wasted from steam vr being opened within the oculus dash. Presenting:
The Oculus Killer[github.com]

Backup your oculus dash executable, do not get rid of it. if something goes wrong itll be very easy to just put the original dash back in if you do so.

The oculus killer replaces the oculus dashboard that is installed on your PC with a program that tricks the oculus to launching steamVR directly into the headset, instead of nesting it inside of the oculus dash. The performance gain for this in general is massive and 100% worth doing. Just be sure that your lethal company vr settings have set steamVR to the VR runtime not OpenXR.

If you are having problems with the mod trying to use the oculus OpenXR for either lethal company or for other games, you can use OVR Advanced Settings to force these games to run through SteamVR instead by opening OVR Advanced > Settings> Application Settings and scrolling down to "Force Use SteamVR (Disable Oculus API [experimental])".

you can acquire OVR Advanced here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1009850/OVR_Advanced_Settings/

That's all!

With these various different ways of improving performance in lethal company fingers crossed these will work for you!

Do you know any other mods, tips or more for improving performance? if so please leave a comment as I plan on updating and adding to this guide as more ways to make this game run better come along :)

Good luck, have fun!

[FerwynaTTV]

@Lord cheezus rice

There are two more mod that I intend to add to this guide soon that may also help, i'd suggest trying out the following mods:
LethalPerformance
LethalSponge

Lethal Performance is a mod that does some CPU based optimisations and reduces GC allocation, while LethalSponge is a total rewrite of the games shaders with minimal difference to vanilla for a much better performance gain, hope those help!

[Heavy gunship plane]

it don't work.

[HoloLiveSonic™]

if only i've seen this guide a lot sooner, i would enjoy this game a lot more if i dont crash as often

[FerwynaTTV]

@gui348_ what are your system specs? it might just be the case that an upgrade here or there is necessary, there is unfortunately only so much tweaking you can do to get something running on older hardware

[gui348_]

My game runs at an average of 27-30 fps, it's not a good amount, but it's clearly playable, in fact almost... Because every time I land on an eclipsed or flooded moon, my PC simply crashes when the ship is landing or when I enter the facility (usually when entering the facility)... I've simply tried every possible way, such as putting optimization mods, installing programs that optimize the PC, but nothing works.

[The_Dark_Slayer]

how do i know that the Launch Commands are activated/desactivated when i put it down in the launch option?

[FerwynaTTV]

There's a lot of jank under the hood for lethal company so its hard to say.
I will however suggest setting the games priority in task manager to high (don't set it to real time, bad idea), and if you have an integrated GPU check that lethal company is actually using your 3060ti and not the integrated.

Are you playing modded at all? Sometimes it does just come down to a few particular mods have some serious performance problems.

[Naomi♿]

Any Idea why lethal is refusing to fully use my CPU and GPU

Currently running a Ryzen 5 3600 and a 3060ti both sit at around 20% and I get FPS drops down to 40 fps.

[Coffee]

It's the vanilla game launched through steam, I don't know why it's not doing anything.

[FerwynaTTV]

Had a feeling that it'd need to be done through the launcher or directly to the executable itself, thanks for telling me where it is in r2modman, i'll add that to the guide :)